"You shall know the truth?"

One of the most famous verses that Jesus uttered is found in John 8 where Jesus says, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."  But, unfortunately, this verse is usually taken out of context.  Just before this verse it says the Jews believed in him.  But, if you see the total context of John 8, you quickly discover they did not believe in him as God.  They apparently believed in him as a miracle worker, maybe as a teacher, maybe as a prophet, but not as God.  In other words, the Jews believed on their own terms, not on Jesus' terms.  They claimed God as their father because they were descendants of Abraham, but in the following discussion, Jesus told them bluntly they were not children of God, but children of the devil.  The devil was their father; which, of course, they completely rejected.

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free."  Not if we define the truth on our terms, as the American church often does.  Fast forward to America; especially white America, but all of America.  White America really doesn't want to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth, especially when it comes to issues of oppression and justice.

It took me half of my life--until I was forty-two years of age, before I even began to understand how the biblical teaching on oppression applied to modern America.  My pastors never taught me about the biblical teaching on oppression.  My Bible profs at a Christian liberal arts college did not teach me the biblical teaching on oppression.

Only when Martin Luther King was assassinated in April, 1968, did I begin to understand how oppression had pervaded America.  The Holy Spirit opened my mind and I began a fifty year pilgrimage to understand oppression and how it had impacted black America.

Fourteen years later in 1982, I discovered a book written by the Hebrew scholar, Thomas Hanks about the extensive biblical teaching on oppression.  By then I was about fifty-five years old.  I had a lot of false information piled up in my brain; it took awhile to get rid of that so that I could allow the biblical teaching in.   No one during the previous fifty-five years of my life, had ever mentored me on the biblical teaching on oppression so slowly, but surely, I began to allow the biblical truth to set me free.

I am not the only one that has been blinded by false information, false teaching.  A brilliant black woman, a lawyer, who worked in the area of Civil Rights confesses in her book, The New Jim Crow, that she didn't see the new system of oppression which she now calls mass incarceration at first.
Not only Alexander, but also all of the civil rights organizations such as the NAACP; they missed it.  They did not understand what was happening was a new system of oppression.  Civil rights organization knew there were problems, but they didn't understand the depth of the problems.

You often have to go beyond surface events to understand how a system of oppression develops and works.  It helps enormously to have made an in depth biblical study of the 555 references in the Old Testament to oppression.  It helps to understand that oppression can cause PTSD, see Exodus 6:9.

So I missed the biblical teaching on oppression and justice for much of my life.  Michelle Alexander as well did not understand a system of oppression that was developing right under her nose.  Neither did the NAACP.  Neither do most white churches, and neither did J.D. Vance, author of the book, Hillbilly Elegy, which Vance describes as a memoir of a family and a culture in crisis.  This book is a brilliant and honest description of individual, family, and community cultural dysfunction.  But Vance fails to describe how the larger American culture, and more specifically coal mining companies became systems of oppression that exploited Appalachian whites.  As a result, Vance draws some erroneous conclusions: "These problems, these dysfunctions were not created by governments and corporations or anyone else.  We created them, and only we can fix them."

According to Matthew Stewart, Vance is flat out wrong.  Stewart  would say the government and corporations had a lot to do with the poverty of Appalachian whites.  Stewart, in the June, 2018 issue of the Atlantic magazine says the upper 10 percent, which he and his clan were members, rule modern America.  All the rest of us, including Appalachian whites, are to one degree or another being exploited by predatory wealth distribution systems, predatory taxation systems, and predatory government budgets.  So in 2018, 90 percent of us fall among the oppressed.  Our incomes are either stagnant or declining or pushing us deeper into poverty.

So without a deep understanding of the biblical truth on oppression and justice, any of us can draw wrong conclusions.  Vance did get the point on trauma correctly, but he never connected trauma with its basic cause of oppression.  I would like to quote at some length from Vance's comment on how trauma deeply damaged individuals and families and communities in Appalachia:

"Psychologists call the everyday occurrences of my and Lindsay's life "adverse childhood experiences," or ACEs.  ACEs are traumatic childhood events, and their consequences reach far into adulthood.  The trauma need not be physical.  The following events or feelings are some of the most common ACEs:

• being sworn at, insulted, or humiliated by parents
• being pushed, grabbed, or having something thrown at you
• feeling that your family didn't support each other
• having parents who were separated or divorced
• living with an alcoholic or a drug user
• living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide
• watching a loved one be physically abused

ACEs happen everywhere, in every community.  But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world."

"four in every ten working-class people had faced multiple instances of childhood trauma."

"Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers."

It took me a long time before I saw the deep connection between oppression and trauma.  Before I read the book "Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome" which tied oppression and trauma together for me, I made a mistaken analysis of what happened to the Perkins family in Mississippi.  John and Vera Mae during the 60's were on the cutting edge of Christian Community Development and the Civil Rights movement in Mendenhall, Mississippi.  Among many things they did, was to be on the cutting edge of the integration of Mendenhall high school.  That meant their two oldest children were the first blacks to integrate Mendenhall high school. They were treated horribly; it was hell on earth for Spencer and Joanie.  The daily trauma was so bad it deeply impacted Joanie.  At the end of the year, Joanie was suffering from PTSD and the doctor said they had to get her out of that high school.  

As I look back, I think most of the children, especially the older ones, were traumatized and therefore damaged.  At one time I probably put too much blame upon the parents for putting the ministry ahead of the welfare of their children.  Now I realize I was looking at it in the wrong way.  It was the white oppression that was at fault, not parental neglect.  So unless you had dug deeply into oppression and then trauma, you should never move onto dysfunction and treat it alone.

Many whites divorce dysfunction from oppression and end up blaming the victim of oppression.